Rails... Rails... Rails

Chee Chong Hwa aka CCH, a Malaysian Chief Software Architect blogs on his experiences with Ruby on Rail running on Win2003 Server+Apache 2.26 environment since 2007 as well as on Ubuntu 9.04 since 2009

Friday, November 13, 2015

We come bearing gifts! It's Rails 4.2, and the final version is ready just in time for Christmas. It's full of great toys, useful gizmos, and polished edges, courtesy of a fantastic community of merry elves who've been coding away with jolly glee for months.

This is probably also the most well-tested new major release of Rails in a long time. Through four betas and three release candidates, tons of people have helped ensure that regressions and bugs have been caught. Since the first beta, we have some 1600+ commits of spit and polish applied. So you have good reason to be excited!

To recap, here's a walkthrough of the major new goodies:

Active Job, ActionMailer #deliver_later

The headline feature for Rails 4.2 is the brand new Active Job framework, and its integrations. Active Job is an adapter layer on top of queuing systems like Resque, Delayed Job, Sidekiq, and more. You can write your jobs to Active Job, and they'll run on all these queues with no changes.

With an always-configured queue in place (though the default is just an inline runner), we can build on top of that where it makes sense. And the first place it makes sense is to send Action Mailer emails asynchronously. So we're introducing the #deliver_later method, which will do just that: Add your email to be sent as a job to a queue, so you don't bog down the controller or model. Voila!

The cherry on top is our new GlobalID library. It makes it easy to pass Active Record objects to jobs by serializing them in a generic form. This means you no longer have to manually pack and unpack your Active Records by passing ids. Just give the job the straight AR object, and it'll serialize it using GlobalID, and deserialize it at run time. So much easier!

Adequate Record

Aaron Patterson is always hunting for performance bounties in Rails, and with an improvement project called Adequate Record for Active Record, he's come up good. A lot of common queries are now no less than twice as fast in Rails 4.2! This is a great step forward for performance. While computers are constantly getting cheaper and performance is improving, nobody ever said "hey, get that free speed out of my framework". So there you go: Some free speed, buddy!

Web Console

Out of the wonderful Google Summer of Code for Rails campaign comes Web Console, which gives you a development console to inspect the state of affairs on all exception pages! It even allows you to jump between the different points in the backtrace, and you'll be able to inspect things right at that point.

Foreign Keys

Rails has long had a tumultuous relationship with foreign keys, but the drama days are now over. If you want to have foreign keys, you can have foreign keys, and Rails will still smile as it takes your order. The migration DSL gets add_foreign_key and remove_foreign_key and the standard schema.rb dumper will support maintaing these declarations. Foreign key support starts out as an exclusive to the MySQL and PostgreSQL adapters.

And so much more...

The above are just the highlights. We have many more goodies packed into this release than that. You can read a great summary in therelease notes.

Maintenance consequences and Rails 5.0!

As per our maintenance policy, the release of Rails 4.2 means bug fixes will only apply to 4-2-stable, regular security issues to 4.2.x, 4.1.x, and severe security issues to 4.2.x, 4.1.x, and 3.2.x. In addition to these already stated commitments, the honorable Rafael França has agreed to also apply bug fixes to 4-1-stable. So everyone still on 4.1 and unable to move quickly can thank Rafael!

Rails 4.2 also marks the last big release in the 4.x series. With this release out, we're now working towards the big Rails 5.0! This means rails/master is now targeting 5.0.

Rails 5.0 will target Ruby 2.2+ exclusively. There are a bunch of optimizations coming in Ruby 2.2 that are going to be very nice, but most importantly for Rails, symbols are going to be garbage collected. This means we can shed a lot of weight related to juggling strings when we accept input from the outside world. It also means that we can convert fully to keyword arguments and all the other good stuff from the latest Ruby.

The release target for Rails 5.0 is currently Fall of 2015. So there's a while yet, but we're putting this out there for people to know, so gem maintainers and other Ruby implementations can know where we're going. We'll be working on putting out somewhat of a road map for the features when that's become a bit clearer.

Thanks to all and happy holidays!

It continues to be a pleasure and an honor to be involved with the amazing Ruby on Rails community – both contributors and users. The collaboration and resulting quality has never been better. Have a great holiday season and New Year's, and we'll see you all with more delicious releases in 2015!

One of security fixes impacts all users and is related to HTML
escaping code. The other two fixes impacts people using select_tag's
prompt option and strip_tags helper from ActionPack.
We are also removing all the deprecation warnings that we introduced
in 3.2.x.
We have decided to stop introducing API deprecations in all point
releases going forward. From now on, it'll only happen in majors/minors.

Please note that the last round of security fixes DO NOT cover the
situations that these patches fix. Therefore it is suggested that all
users upgrade immediately. For more information about these issues,
please see the annoumcenents on the rubyonrails-security mailing list.
Other changes for this release can be found in each component's CHANGELOG:

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Posted by aaronp June 16, 2011 @ 10:27 AM
Hi everybody!
Rails 3.0.9 has been released! Since I am at Nordic Ruby, I will deem this Nordic Ruby Edition. ;-)
The main boogs fixed in this release are problems dealing with modifications of SafeBuffers.gem install rails or update your Gemfile and bundle update while it's hot!

CHANGES

The major changes in this release of Rails are bug fixes surrounding modifications to SafeBuffer strings. We had places that were modifying SafeBuffers and those places raised exceptions after the security fixes in the 3.0.8 release.
We've since updated those code paths, and now we have this nice release for you today!
Please check the CHANGELOG files in each section on github for more details.
For an exhaustive list of the commits in this release, please see github.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

This morning my team over at Envy Labs released a free online tutorial called Rails for Zombies. The website combines screencasts with in-browser coding to provide an interactive learning experience teaching the basics of Ruby on Rails.
Learning Rails for the first time should be fun, and Rails for Zombies allows you to get your feet wet without any setup or configuration. At the moment the application has five episodes. Each episode consists of a single screencast followed by a group of exercises which must be completed before moving forward. Once you complete all the labs, you unlock a hidden video which shows you where to go to continue your Rails learning.
If you have any friends who need to get started with Rails, hopefully this will help.

Posted by David November 15, 2010 @ 07:34 PM on Riding Rails
How about some free speed? Well, here you go. Rails 3.0.3 includes a much faster version of Active Record that reclaims the performance lost when we went from Rails 2.3.x to 3.x and then some. Aaron Patterson has done a phenomenal job benchmarking, tweaking, and tuning the ARel engine that underpins Active Record 3 and the result is Teh Snappy.
You can read more about Aaron’s work in his ARel 2.0 write-up. If you dare, you can also have a look at his RubyConf slides that went over the rewrite and speed-up in even greater detail (warning: there are slides of boys kissing!).
In addition to the free speed, we’ve also included a truckload of minor fixes. So everything just works better and faster. What more can you ask for? Oh, that it’s a drop-in replacement for Rails 3.0—there are no API changes. You got it.
See all the changes on Github. Install the latest version using gem install rails. Or bind yourself to the v3.0.3 tag.
Enjoy!Note: Active Record 3.0.3 is mistakenly reporting its tiny version as 1 instead of 3. This has no impact on anything you do unless you were specifically checking that tiny version. But if it bothers you lots, it’s fixed on the 3-0-stable branch.

Welcome to Rails.. Rails... Rails !

In 1995, I started the popular Clipper...Clipper... Clipper website (no blogs then) which was very popular and linked by virtually every Clipper-related site. When I switched to Windows via Delphi in 1997, I started the Delphi... Delphi... Delphi site. In June 2007, I discovered Ruby on Rails and no prize for guessing what I am gonna name this blog. which I started on 2nd October 2007.